1). Yes, yes it is. Efficiency is paramount. We don't have enough of any given fossil fuel to supply the entire transportation needs of the country for the next few decades.
2). ANYTHING "can be synthesized", but none of them are cost-effective. End of story. Gasoline can be synthesized, too, so switching our infrastructure over would be a very costly unnecessary step. For synthesis, where do you think hydrogen comes from??? WE GET IT FROM NATURAL GAS. It's insanelly expensive to get hydrogen from water, or just about anything else.
Your ideas reek of magical thinking, and complete ignorance of the topic.
what is it that you n900 can do that my rooted Droid2 with Ubuntu in a chroot can't that makes your Nokia more of a "usable PDA"?
The easy one would be: MPlayer.
Another is NX Client... you can run it in your chrooted Ubuntu, but then you have to go through a VNC client, which is extremely clumsy and has problems with input.
So if I want to make a big purchase that I can't afford for instance I can buy it now and pay it off in up to 2 months interest free.
Why don't you control yourself for a few months, save a little bit of that money, and then never need a credit card again?
Sure, you're not paying interest (suposedly... every that I've heard say that before comes back with "Oh, except that one time, and the other time..."), but you could be EARNING interest on that money. Right now, Ally gives 0.8% on it's CHECKING accounts... more than any brick & mortar banks are giving on even their savings or 1year CDs right now...
Plus, you'll be slightly less screwed when the unforseen happens. I've known bigshot software developers who behaved the same way, and when eventually losing their jobs for one reason or another, and not IMMEDIATELY finding a new job, find themselves broke and homeless, but with credit cards... destroying their credit, add still having the same problem of being broke and homeless. Leaves you worse off after, with bad credit making it impossible to find rentals even once you're back to work and making money.
Why would I buy an electric vehicle when the electricity is produced with natural gas? Why don't I just burn the natural gas in my vehicle?
1). Because the POWER PLANT that burns the natural gas does so at double the efficiency you could with a car-sized engine. Fuel cells could change this, but they're damn expensive, and there's no sign of that changing.
2). Then you're stuck on another fossile fuel, with no path forward. Here in CA there's a healthy mix of hydro, wind, solar, and natural gas... Burn just natural gas and you lose out on that cheap hydro power, and the rest.
I think trying to read in bed with my mobile or my laptop is kinda sucky, and I think a tablet might work much better for this.
It won't... Tablets are too damn heavy and that starts weighing on you very quickly. Plus, there's no way to hold them one-handed... through pure chance, phones are just the right size where wrapping your hand around them makes a great "handle". Tablets need some new technology that'll allow an easy one-hand grip. Maybe that'll be straps, or finger holes, or some gel backing material, but right now tablets have horrible ergonomics, and your smartphone is indeed the best possible method for reading in bed right now.
You missed the mark... What made the iPhone break thorough was the fine integration work. I had a WinCE PDA a decade ago, too, and it was an absolute nightmare to use for anything... Little things like the power button putting the device into standby (instead of just shutting off the screen) made it useless as an MP3/Ogg player.
The apps were all massively crippled. Pocket Office was inferior to Wordpad. Browsers were all crap, crippled compared to desktop versions, and nobody had figured out how to render full sized web pages on a 240x320 screen. They were still massively dependent on desktops. And worst of all, WinCE was just unresponsive crap. It was laggy as hell on 300MHz+ CPUs when Palm and others were snappy on 30MHz CPUs. The start menu model was never a good idea. And I despised having to go download a REGISTRY EDITOR for my PDA first thing to fix insanely stupid default settings...
Now if you actually wanted to get stuff done, Psions were awesome. Slide-out keyboard. Office suite that allowed composing pretty full-featured documents, even embedding charts and drawings into documents, and printing them out directly to the nearest IRDA enabled laser printer. There, some of the limitations were avoided just because the portrait display eliminated side-to-side scrolling with web browsing and whatnot. Even had a PDF reader, but you'd have to squint to read the tiny fonts, or deal with side-side scrolling every line... the software that makes smartphones tolerable today just wasn't even a dream back then.
The author in the study you cite mentions that he's not sure how to apply what has worked in Finland to the US, owing to the tremendous differences.
The US has tremendous difficulties, period. It can't work because the US simply isn't heavily socialized, like Finland.
And that link was just the first thing I turned up with a quick search. There's endless other sources of info on the situation, that discuss it in different ways and have different opinions.
its difficult to imagine that you could tell every American, "do whatever you want for the next 4 years and we'll pay for it" and that this would be sustainable
We do that for 13 years straight, already, with K-12, and it wasn't long ago that people were advocating mandatory pre-school as well, adding another year. What makes it different when you turn 18? State colleges are heavily subsidized already, though moreso in some states than others. It wouldn't be a huge change to fully fund it... maybe take a couple years off K-12 to help pay for it (Finland has fewer years of primary education than the US).
I think the social safety net is generally what keeps everyone happy. You just don't have to worry about losing your job, or never being able to get a high-paying or in-demand one in the first place, because it's just a pay cut. You can be quite comfortable even without working, not scraping by like with US Welfare/Social Security. A high paying job just means more disposable income you don't really need, so people chose what they want to do, and on good terms (shorter hours, more vacation, etc.).
There are certainly downsides... Immigration has to be restricted, since all those social services (eg. health care) are extremely expensive to provide, and too many people that don't support themselves would eventually overwhelm the system.
I am romantically in favor of the idea of the mysty eyed dreamer going to school for indian tribal botany or some other esoteric pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. That's actually probably closer to the original idea of the university. But that experience is something he or she needs to pay for privately -- asking me to help is ridiculous. Making it national policy and funding it at the federal level is suicidal.
I agreed with you up to this point. While it doesn't work in the US, this "romantic" ideal of pure education works perfectly well in more socialist economies. Finland, in particular, comes to mind, where your education (and expenses) are completely paid for by the state, for as long as you want to take. The downside being, once you're working, the majority of your paycheck disappears in taxes.
And with all this, their test scores are among the best, their unemployment rate is low, and their economy is solid.
The general publics expectation of production values means small, indie content production just won't compete with the hollywood projects.
That's basically only true of action, sci-fi, and a few others, and CGI can bring that down dramatically. The vast majority of films Hollywood churns out are a bunch of people walking around, talking to each other... That doesn't require all that much money to do right.
One of the best movies in recent years is an Indie most people never heard of... The Big Empty (2003) cost all of $1.9 Million. If they didn't sign up with big studios for distributiion, and instead gave Netflix/Hulu/Redbox/etc sweetheart deals, I could see it having become a very famous film, rather than semi-obscure, despite the all-star cast.
Being in So.Cal, I asked my neighbor, Jesus Hernandez, if that was true. He said he only went there for a short trip once, but he liked South America just fine.
it is hard to believe that America was at one time, the leading nation in science.
Funny thing is, I'm watching a documentary right now about how extremely afraid of Nuclear power the German at large is (irationally so). Germany was thee scientific powerhouse before the US, and seems to be working in that direction again, largely unabated by public ignorance and fear.
And do you really think there was ever a tiime when the US public collectively said "Yay Science, Damn the consequences, Don't let my dogma stop you"? That's nothing but fantasy.
The best way to save money is to be compatible with slightly obsolete technology. I'm sure there's lots of LCDs out there which only have VGA imports. So when considering buying a $25 toy, whether it'll work with stuff setting next to the nearest dumpster, or will require $200 in accessories, is a big consideration.
I'm resigned to my country falling out of its former place as the world powerhouse of science and engineering. In the 50's, 60's, it was very much the USA, and everyone else a distant second.
To be fair, the US didn't have the title for very long. We got it in the 1930s as huge numbers of talented people were fleeing a 3-continent-wide war zone, and the US was just lucky enough to be a good distance away from the fight.
If immigration policies these days were less strict and bureaucratic, we might continue the tradition of brain-drain, regardless.
Use their major and them having a degree as a screening criteria for work-ethic and overall ability to accomplish tasks put to them under a deadline
Or better yet, don't. Getting a degree doesn't show you have a better work ethic or any other abilities than the general public... It just shows that you're bad at math... Get deep into debt by spending obscene amounts of money for years, rather than EARNING money full time for that same period.
If you look at job listings, what do they always say? "BS in computer science OR equivalent experience..." So you get a choice between paying a University to give you busywork for years, or going out and earning money that whole time instead... Tough choice, I know.
For the record, at work I have a Jr employee who has a double masters, has been here several years longer than I have, and yet can barely be trusted to handle the most basic tasks without incident. For work ethic and dependability, I'll take an honorable discharge from the US Army / Navy / Marines any day over a diploma, or just about anything else for that matter.
Now, if they got their degree in half the normal time... that's something.
I could connect about 150 of my neighbors with a gigabit fenceline network for about $300 total.
Well that's complete bullshit... $2 per person? What the hell are you smoking? I understand people vastly underestimating the difficulty in last-mile networking, but you've gone completely off the rails.
Let's say that's 6 people per household... just try and find a 48-port gigabit switch on your budget... And copper really is a horrible and dangerous thing when used intra-building (think lightning, neighboring power cables, etc), so upgrade that to fiber. Then everyone needs fiber NICs/routers/whatever. And you'll need a whole lot of fiber. And we haven't even started scratched the surface of your insane plan.
I would wait until there is a second device running Tizen before I would consider it a viable solution
If I can buy and use a device, it's viable. Is Windows 7 more viable? How about Symbian?
Considering how many people are hard-core fans of the N900, I think even one device coming out would be welcomed. And a device that can run apps from other platforms, including desktop apps, is much, much more "viable" than it might seem at first glance.
Android phones make pretty good thin clients, but Android apps have a number of bugs and limitations I wouldn't have to suffer with if I could compile aterm, xterm, or Putty. Not to menting NX Clients... haven't seen one for Android/iOS/BB/Palm yet, but N900s have ports of it...
Tell a meth head they're only getting 50 cents for meth instead of 50 bucks for meth a couple times, they'll figure out that using a magnet might be a good idea.
Any activity that consumes significant time, yet doesn't pay enough money to support a drug habit, is tantamount to "rehab".
I've never heard in 20 years of an outage being caused by buried cable being dug up by thieves.
it's not like it's going to deter them from stealing the cable in the first place under the assumption that the cable is copper.
Sounds like a good plan. Theives do all the work, then find their payday going down the drain. If they can't tell the difference, a relatively small percentage of this stuff being installed discourages them from stealing the actual copper cables, too, since they can't tell if any target is going to pay-off or not.
If a Linux admin can manage 2X as many servers, while only demanding 2X the salary, it's a wash. In addition, eliminating the purchase price of Linux (versus Windows) means a big savings, even if Linux admins do cost more.
If some code with a proprietary license has 5000 code contributors you have EXACTLY the same problem
Okay, point me to ONE proprietary-license product which has 5,000 independent license-holders. Said product also needs to make source code available reasonably easily.
Still don't believe me? How about the OpenSSH PRNG flaw that went unnoticed for two years, despite being used in servers all over the world.
No such thing... You probably meant OpenSSL, but I doubt a typo made you omit the fact that this was ONLY in the Debian packages of it, and worse, they were warned the patch was a terrible idea and ignored the advice.
Slashdot Mirror
1). Yes, yes it is. Efficiency is paramount. We don't have enough of any given fossil fuel to supply the entire transportation needs of the country for the next few decades.
2). ANYTHING "can be synthesized", but none of them are cost-effective. End of story. Gasoline can be synthesized, too, so switching our infrastructure over would be a very costly unnecessary step. For synthesis, where do you think hydrogen comes from??? WE GET IT FROM NATURAL GAS. It's insanelly expensive to get hydrogen from water, or just about anything else.
Your ideas reek of magical thinking, and complete ignorance of the topic.
No, it had horrible problems scaling up. It never worked.
The easy one would be: MPlayer.
Another is NX Client... you can run it in your chrooted Ubuntu, but then you have to go through a VNC client, which is extremely clumsy and has problems with input.
Why don't you control yourself for a few months, save a little bit of that money, and then never need a credit card again?
Sure, you're not paying interest (suposedly... every that I've heard say that before comes back with "Oh, except that one time, and the other time..."), but you could be EARNING interest on that money. Right now, Ally gives 0.8% on it's CHECKING accounts... more than any brick & mortar banks are giving on even their savings or 1year CDs right now...
Plus, you'll be slightly less screwed when the unforseen happens. I've known bigshot software developers who behaved the same way, and when eventually losing their jobs for one reason or another, and not IMMEDIATELY finding a new job, find themselves broke and homeless, but with credit cards... destroying their credit, add still having the same problem of being broke and homeless. Leaves you worse off after, with bad credit making it impossible to find rentals even once you're back to work and making money.
1). Because the POWER PLANT that burns the natural gas does so at double the efficiency you could with a car-sized engine. Fuel cells could change this, but they're damn expensive, and there's no sign of that changing.
2). Then you're stuck on another fossile fuel, with no path forward. Here in CA there's a healthy mix of hydro, wind, solar, and natural gas... Burn just natural gas and you lose out on that cheap hydro power, and the rest.
It won't... Tablets are too damn heavy and that starts weighing on you very quickly. Plus, there's no way to hold them one-handed... through pure chance, phones are just the right size where wrapping your hand around them makes a great "handle". Tablets need some new technology that'll allow an easy one-hand grip. Maybe that'll be straps, or finger holes, or some gel backing material, but right now tablets have horrible ergonomics, and your smartphone is indeed the best possible method for reading in bed right now.
You missed the mark... What made the iPhone break thorough was the fine integration work. I had a WinCE PDA a decade ago, too, and it was an absolute nightmare to use for anything... Little things like the power button putting the device into standby (instead of just shutting off the screen) made it useless as an MP3/Ogg player.
The apps were all massively crippled. Pocket Office was inferior to Wordpad. Browsers were all crap, crippled compared to desktop versions, and nobody had figured out how to render full sized web pages on a 240x320 screen. They were still massively dependent on desktops. And worst of all, WinCE was just unresponsive crap. It was laggy as hell on 300MHz+ CPUs when Palm and others were snappy on 30MHz CPUs. The start menu model was never a good idea. And I despised having to go download a REGISTRY EDITOR for my PDA first thing to fix insanely stupid default settings...
Now if you actually wanted to get stuff done, Psions were awesome. Slide-out keyboard. Office suite that allowed composing pretty full-featured documents, even embedding charts and drawings into documents, and printing them out directly to the nearest IRDA enabled laser printer. There, some of the limitations were avoided just because the portrait display eliminated side-to-side scrolling with web browsing and whatnot. Even had a PDF reader, but you'd have to squint to read the tiny fonts, or deal with side-side scrolling every line... the software that makes smartphones tolerable today just wasn't even a dream back then.
I see no basis for that belief.
And? Are you suggesting Wisconsin has a superior education system? Happier people?
The US has tremendous difficulties, period. It can't work because the US simply isn't heavily socialized, like Finland.
And that link was just the first thing I turned up with a quick search. There's endless other sources of info on the situation, that discuss it in different ways and have different opinions.
We do that for 13 years straight, already, with K-12, and it wasn't long ago that people were advocating mandatory pre-school as well, adding another year. What makes it different when you turn 18? State colleges are heavily subsidized already, though moreso in some states than others. It wouldn't be a huge change to fully fund it... maybe take a couple years off K-12 to help pay for it (Finland has fewer years of primary education than the US).
I think the social safety net is generally what keeps everyone happy. You just don't have to worry about losing your job, or never being able to get a high-paying or in-demand one in the first place, because it's just a pay cut. You can be quite comfortable even without working, not scraping by like with US Welfare/Social Security. A high paying job just means more disposable income you don't really need, so people chose what they want to do, and on good terms (shorter hours, more vacation, etc.).
There are certainly downsides... Immigration has to be restricted, since all those social services (eg. health care) are extremely expensive to provide, and too many people that don't support themselves would eventually overwhelm the system.
I agreed with you up to this point. While it doesn't work in the US, this "romantic" ideal of pure education works perfectly well in more socialist economies. Finland, in particular, comes to mind, where your education (and expenses) are completely paid for by the state, for as long as you want to take. The downside being, once you're working, the majority of your paycheck disappears in taxes.
And with all this, their test scores are among the best, their unemployment rate is low, and their economy is solid.
http://blogs.indystar.com/education/2012/01/20/lesson-from-finland-everything-indiana-is-doing-is-wrong/
That's basically only true of action, sci-fi, and a few others, and CGI can bring that down dramatically. The vast majority of films Hollywood churns out are a bunch of people walking around, talking to each other... That doesn't require all that much money to do right.
One of the best movies in recent years is an Indie most people never heard of... The Big Empty (2003) cost all of $1.9 Million. If they didn't sign up with big studios for distributiion, and instead gave Netflix/Hulu/Redbox/etc sweetheart deals, I could see it having become a very famous film, rather than semi-obscure, despite the all-star cast.
http://www.thebigempty.com/news.html
Being in So.Cal, I asked my neighbor, Jesus Hernandez, if that was true. He said he only went there for a short trip once, but he liked South America just fine.
Funny thing is, I'm watching a documentary right now about how extremely afraid of Nuclear power the German at large is (irationally so). Germany was thee scientific powerhouse before the US, and seems to be working in that direction again, largely unabated by public ignorance and fear.
And do you really think there was ever a tiime when the US public collectively said "Yay Science, Damn the consequences, Don't let my dogma stop you"? That's nothing but fantasy.
The best way to save money is to be compatible with slightly obsolete technology. I'm sure there's lots of LCDs out there which only have VGA imports. So when considering buying a $25 toy, whether it'll work with stuff setting next to the nearest dumpster, or will require $200 in accessories, is a big consideration.
To be fair, the US didn't have the title for very long. We got it in the 1930s as huge numbers of talented people were fleeing a 3-continent-wide war zone, and the US was just lucky enough to be a good distance away from the fight.
If immigration policies these days were less strict and bureaucratic, we might continue the tradition of brain-drain, regardless.
Or better yet, don't. Getting a degree doesn't show you have a better work ethic or any other abilities than the general public... It just shows that you're bad at math... Get deep into debt by spending obscene amounts of money for years, rather than EARNING money full time for that same period.
If you look at job listings, what do they always say? "BS in computer science OR equivalent experience..." So you get a choice between paying a University to give you busywork for years, or going out and earning money that whole time instead... Tough choice, I know.
For the record, at work I have a Jr employee who has a double masters, has been here several years longer than I have, and yet can barely be trusted to handle the most basic tasks without incident. For work ethic and dependability, I'll take an honorable discharge from the US Army / Navy / Marines any day over a diploma, or just about anything else for that matter.
Now, if they got their degree in half the normal time... that's something.
Well that's complete bullshit... $2 per person? What the hell are you smoking? I understand people vastly underestimating the difficulty in last-mile networking, but you've gone completely off the rails.
Let's say that's 6 people per household... just try and find a 48-port gigabit switch on your budget... And copper really is a horrible and dangerous thing when used intra-building (think lightning, neighboring power cables, etc), so upgrade that to fiber. Then everyone needs fiber NICs/routers/whatever. And you'll need a whole lot of fiber. And we haven't even started scratched the surface of your insane plan.
If I can buy and use a device, it's viable. Is Windows 7 more viable? How about Symbian?
Considering how many people are hard-core fans of the N900, I think even one device coming out would be welcomed. And a device that can run apps from other platforms, including desktop apps, is much, much more "viable" than it might seem at first glance.
Android phones make pretty good thin clients, but Android apps have a number of bugs and limitations I wouldn't have to suffer with if I could compile aterm, xterm, or Putty. Not to menting NX Clients... haven't seen one for Android/iOS/BB/Palm yet, but N900s have ports of it...
Any activity that consumes significant time, yet doesn't pay enough money to support a drug habit, is tantamount to "rehab".
http://www.nbcchicago.com/traffic/transit/Copper-Wire-Thefts-Interupt-South-Shore-Commuter-Rail-Line-106797133.html
http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/cables-stolen-from-dubai-electricity-authority-court-hears
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Copper-theft-suspects-free-on-bond-627116.php
Sounds like a good plan. Theives do all the work, then find their payday going down the drain. If they can't tell the difference, a relatively small percentage of this stuff being installed discourages them from stealing the actual copper cables, too, since they can't tell if any target is going to pay-off or not.
You're completely wrong.
If a Linux admin can manage 2X as many servers, while only demanding 2X the salary, it's a wash. In addition, eliminating the purchase price of Linux (versus Windows) means a big savings, even if Linux admins do cost more.
Okay, point me to ONE proprietary-license product which has 5,000 independent license-holders. Said product also needs to make source code available reasonably easily.
It's not true with decent earbuds, in fact. Senheiser even has "noise isolating" earbuds.
Plenty of middle of the road traditional headphones have more of a sound leakage problem than any earbuds.
No such thing... You probably meant OpenSSL, but I doubt a typo made you omit the fact that this was ONLY in the Debian packages of it, and worse, they were warned the patch was a terrible idea and ignored the advice.